Stories like this have surfaced in BioEdge before, but I have always found them quite touching. We report below that researchers have found that a Neanderthal who lived in a large cave in Iraq about 50,000 years ago was terribly handicapped. Not only was he blind in one eye, missing a forearm, and crippled, but he was also profoundly deaf. With Pleistocene lions and tigers prowling in the neighbourhood, this was a big handicap for a forager.

How did he survive? His clan cared for him, tended to his needs, healed his wounds and protected him. He died at the ripe old age of 40 or 50 (equivalent to about 80 nowadays). Obviously Thomas Hobbes' infamous maxim — that the life of man outside society is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” — needs to be revised. Primitive as they were, these Neanderthals had their own family-based version of Obamacare. 

Michael Cook
Neanderthals cared for their disabled
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Michael Cook

Michael Cook edits BioEdge, a bioethics newsletter, and MercatorNet, an on-line magazine whose focus is human dignity. He writes from Sydney, Australia.

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